Podcasting is in the same place today as the Web was in 1994. These personal radio broadcasts, designed to be downloaded to an iPod or similar MP3 player, are homespun, rough-edged, and -- let's be honest -- not all that riveting.

Some of the best podcasts so far are recordings of speeches and roundtables from high-priced technology conferences; some of the worst are like eavesdropping on your next-door neighbors while they're making dinner and talking about their day. One of the most popular podcasts, produced by former MTV ''VJ' Adam Curry, last week included the kind of meandering, boring rant about airport security that you've heard from every person who has taken a flight in post-9/11 America. Yes, Adam, the security lines are a real hassle.

Dear Scott,I think you got the wrong impression of Adam Curry's podcasts by listening to that one about airport security.

He promotes other interesting podcasts, plays music from independent artists and goes on sound seeing tours. It's a lot more than that too.

He's sharing his life with us, it's real, with no commercials.

You've given your readers a false impression of what the content of his shows are like. In fact, you've totally missed one of the coolest things about podcasting.

You say:

"One problem is that, much like the Web before advertising and e-commerce, there's no money in podcasting yet."

Podcasters do not see that as a problem.

Podcasting gives people the opportinity to do something they love. And with the soon to be openedourmedia.org, which will provide free hosting and bandwidth to podcasters, they'll be able to podcast to their hearts content, without having to include commercials.

Sometimes, it's not all about money.--Steve

PS: The online version of the Globe still does not provide clickable links to websites mentioned in your stories.

In fact, You don't even provide a URL to one of the main subjects of your story.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

In order to figure out why my mail is being rejected by the Comcast mail servers, I decided to have an online chat with them:

chat id : 29724be6-0634-49ed-89da-e07f195b85d2steve > HiJames > Thank you for contacting Comcast HSI Customer Support. My name is James. How can I assist you with your Email issuesteve > Can you unblock PORT 25 for my emailsteve > I hear that's why my mail refuses to be sentJames > We do not block port 25.James > If you have a blocked port 25 it is probably being done by your antivirus software.James > You just need to follow its directions in setting it up so it will not block your email.steve > nope no anti virus softwaresteve > i am trying to send mail from an address that is differnet from my comcast addresssteve > and it get rejectedsteve > it used to worksteve > up until recentlysteve > it works once in a while nowJames > Okay you need to set up your email program differently to access our servers when you are traveling.steve > i'm at homesteve > the sender address XXX@XXXXXX.com was rejected by the serversteve > that's youJames > okayJames > The address does not matter.James > in your return email address.James > Is that what you are trying to change?steve > it's just set up that waysteve > it replies to the address I get mail addressed tosteve > so if you send me email at XXX@XXXXXX.comJames > are you using outlook or outlook express?steve > it replies with that int he from fieldsteve > macintosh mailJames > Let me se if I can help let me check the database.steve > are you sure about port 25steve > because i read on broadband reports that comcast blocks that port nowsteve > and that causes this problemsteve > portJames > Let me get our blocked ports list. standbyJames > The only ports that may be actively blocked on the Comcast network are 67, 68, 135, 137, 138, 139, 445, 512, 520, and 1080 at this time. Any ports that are blocked will not be unblocked. If the port you would like to use is on this list, please select another port to use with your software. There are over 10,000 ports available for use. Please be advised that Comcast reserves the entitlement to block any ports on the network without prior notice. We thank you for understanding this security policy.James > What version of mac software are you using jaguar, panthersteve > the latest 10.3.8steve > it started happening after i upgradedsteve > people on the mac boards say it's a coincidenceJames > I use port 25 for my personal mail -- as do most. I do not think we will block it.steve > ok thankssteve > i'll use another host for this emailsteve > byeJames > OkayJames > Thank you for choosing Comcast as your ISP and have a great afternoon! Should you have additional questions, please feel free to chat back with one of our Online Customer Support Specialists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week .James > Customer has closed chat and left the roomJames > Analyst has closed chat and left the room

DATE OF ACTION: Today Letters must arrive in Washington, D.C. by this Friday, March 4, 2005.

ACTION: Mail a brief note to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), opposing a waiver for CSN.

Stand up for local community media, for community access to the media that provide information vital to democracy.

The 400-station chain CSN International is grabbing stations in Boston and nationwide, including powerful stations that would interfere with Boston's long-standing non-commercial campus-community radio.

"Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma's performance could only be described as earnest but painful."

Friday, February 25, 2005

The rate of growth of blogs and bloglike places is actually going to radically increase. Why? Because of software like Photon [ daikini software ].

This is a plug in that lets someone with iPhoto instantly upload photos and captions to their blog. Which means you don't have to go to a special blog-building site... you just point and upload. No doubt that picasa and other programs are out there doing the same.

"Noah Glass, right, and Evan Williams, who founded Odeo in a San Francisco apartment, hope to capitalize on a flood of amateur and professional audio files online."

And the the interesting lead paragraphs:

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24 - The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web's next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city's Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting - the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts. "

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Web logs - the personal online journals better known as blogs - use text to dissect nearly every conceivable topic, and now video blogs, or vlogs, which incorporate moving images, are on the rise. Mobile blogs, or moblogs, have brought blogging into the cellular age by allowing people to post video and photos taken with camera phones to a blog, or to call in an audio posting.

But the object remains the same as with traditional blogs: to inspire (or to provoke) others to post responses to one's ruminations and images.

Some vloggers are further blurring the lines between journalism and blogging by producing news reports of local interest. Steve Garfield of Boston, a self-described citizen reporter, took a video camera to investigate, among other things, whether election campaign workers were following the law by staying 150 feet from polling stations. He posted his report at stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog/2004/09/150_feet.html.

Since there don't seem to be that many Boston area videobloggers, we talked about the group being one that would attract video people who might want to learn how to share their videos on the web, make better videos, and watch each others work.

We talked about a lot of things and had a great time. If future meetings are like our first get together, it'll be a fun and interesting group.

In much the same way that Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation tied together disparate topics through the narrative thread of the fast food business, and written in a witty style that brings to mind media pranksters like Al Franken, Ken Kesey, and Abbie Hoffman, Freedom of Expression® uses intellectual property law as the focal point to show how economic concerns are seriously eroding creativity and free speech.

Collectively, these private journals have taken on a weighty online presence: The Boston Weblogger Group is a top result on a Google search for ''Boston blogs." And together, they've assembled tiny peepholes into different Boston lives.

Steve Garfield's blog offers a multimedia portal, posting video of reality-TV-style episodes of his daily life in Jamaica Plain. Recent posts include a trip to the Boston Wine Expo with his wife, a drive to the gym, and a walk through the grocery store.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

"Seeing Steve Garfield's Off On A Tangent: as seen in TIME Magazine, I'm simply full of respect. What a splendid page! Very special. If only Apple would have a superb page like that.(...)Powerful but elegant. It makes sense to me <www.techpopuli.net> put up a link to this page. The page contains 461 links, a stable amount. The color scheme is fantastic. This is bubblegum for the brain, in a good way."-- Ron Smith, Coding Quality Pages

But as they continue to sell single-day naming rights on eBay, where will FleetCenter execs draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable? We'll find out Feb. 28, when a certain website takes over the arena. The site -- a popular compendium of offbeat news stories and photos -- won the naming rights with a bid of $2,500. ''My point was to do something ridiculous and to donate to charity," said the website's founder, Drew Curtis, who lives in Kentucky. (The Globe isn't publishing the name of the site because it contains links to pornography.) After his first proposed name was rejected by the FleetCenter, Curtis invited his site's visitors to suggest alternatives, and the winner is an acronym too tasteless to reprint here.

Interesting.

The Boston Globe is not publishing the name of the site because it contains links to pornography.

So now the Boston Globe is the FCC? We're like little children in their minds, and the parental Boston Globe feels the need to protect us. How sweet.

This is a good example of why we need alternative sources of news.

FARK.com is the name of the site that contains links to pornography. Ha Ha! But I read if for the articles.

CURTIS: I ended up going with actually the third place contest submission, which was Boston Garden. For people who aren't from the Boston area, that's the name of the center before they called it the FleetCenter when they sold the naming rights. And it was a fairly controversial decision by the company. And there are still a lot of people that would wish it go back to that.

So, I figured that would be kind of fun to go back to Boston Garden for a day.

WALLACE: That was a good one, not as whacky, though, as some of the others. It seems like you kind of went mainstream on us there.

CURTIS: Yes, sort of. I think it depends on whether or not the people over at the FleetCenter were actually there at the time of the controversy. We'll see if they actually end up accepting that one. But I did receive an e-mail from them yesterday, and they said that that sounded like the way they were going to go.

WALLACE: And very briefly, Drew, tell us about Fark.com. What is it?

CURTIS: Sure. Basically, it's a news repository, where we take about 50 to 75 of the strangest news stories of the day and post them for people to make comments on.

This site will provide you with a DNS report for your domain. A very large percentage of domains have DNS problems; this site will help you find those problems and fix them. Also, the "Mail Test" tool will help find mail delivery problems for your domain.

With ANT, you can subscribe to any RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures. ANT will automatically download fresh audio and video content for you to watch and listen to. It can playback any media format, and even syncs audio files with iTunes so you can easily add them to your portable MP3 player.

ANT is a stage that allows anyone to share their original video creations -- from personal video journals made by an emerging community of videobloggers, to the growing ranks of distributed citizen journalists, to home video simply intended for friends and family.

ANT is free, and comes with a default list of videobloggers' feeds. It only runs on the Macintosh right now, but a Windows version is coming soon.

The majority of these videobloggers are going out and creating new, interesting and personal videos all the time.

If you want to check out videoblogger's feeds using a web interface, you can try mefeedia.

mefeedia.com is an RSS aggregator for videobloggers. Sign up, choose the videobloggers you like and watch videos! Mefeedia is an experimental videoblogging community

Andreas Haugstrup Pederson talks about these Specialised Feed Readers over on his blog and says, "I don't expect to begin using them in the future for the simple reason that I don't subscribe to video, I subscribe to people." Check out his thoughts.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Here's my pitch for a next-generation newscast designed for people who no longer watch TV news: 18 to 34 year-old men. From an "open-source rundown" to Fark TV, I push the envelope a bit. Let me know what you think...

Go ahead. Act like you own the place. Delaware North Companies, owner and operator of Boston's FleetCenter, announced today that they have placed single-day naming rights to the sports and entertainment venue up for bid on online auction site eBay.

It's become clear that Gannon's real name is James D. Guckert, which raises another question: How does someone operating under a pseudonym gain such close access to the President of the United States? The Congressional Press Galleries, White House Press Office and, perhaps, the Secrete Service do background checks on all credentialed and "day pass" journalists. Somewhere along the line someone inside the White House knew Gannon wasn't Gannon, but they gave him a waiver anyway.

I'm looking into using register.com's facility to change the cname record on a client's domain to point to their new blog.

In addition to that, they want to have emails that are sent to their domain name, forwarded to their existing email accounts.

It looks like register.com is going to charge them $99/year to support multiple email accounts.

Is it possible to use the mx record to use another host for email forwarding?

Some definitions:

AliasA Domain Alias, which is specified in the C Name section of a zone file, is an extension to a domain name which allows you to create derivatives of the domain that can be pointed to the same or any other domain name on the Internet. An example of a Domain Alias is www.register.com, where "www" functions as the Domain Alias and accesses the same Web site as Register.com.

C NameA C Name, also known as a "canonical name" or "Domain Alias," is the section in a domain name's zone file that specifies whether a subset of the domain name should point to the same or another domain name (location) on the Internet. An example of a C Name is mydomain.register.com.

MX RecordAn MX record, or Mail Exchange record, is a section of a domain name's zone file (a Name Server entry for a domain name) whose entries specify the mail server(s) on the Internet responsible for email services for a specific domain name.

VloggerCon 05 Sessions: Masses' MediaDiscussion Leader: Eli Chapman The rules of the game have changed. The 20th Century was dominated by a mass media of cinema and television where citizens chose to have linear stories poured into our eyes and ears. In the 21st Century, the masses will chose to entertain, inform, and educate themselves. And video blogging is one of many new forms of communication we will have at our disposal in the near future...

VloggerCon 05 Sessions: SustainabilityDiscussion Leaders: Andrew Baron, Josh Kinberg How will people make money from videoblogging? Why is this important? Is it possible? Should it be possible? How will people videoblog through their lifetime with bandwidth/storage limitations? This is a HOT topic amongst vloggers and we want to take the time to speak in a calm, friendly and concise manner, face to face, with the gloves off.

VloggerCon 05 Session: Content is KingDiscussion leaders: Steve Garfield, Mica Scalin, Ryanne Hodson, Jay Dedman Creating and posting videos is the key. Personal storytelling, citizen journalism, art, show and tell...this is at the core of what we're doing. We all have our own style and ideas when we videoblog; let's share.

VloggerCon 05 Sessions: Network of the futureDiscussion leader: Marc Canter Announcement of ourmedia.org, an online community of grassroots media which provide the resources to help videobloggers continue their work for a lifetime...creating a new history and way of connecting to people around the world. Marc is the co-founder of ourmedia.org and will explain how it will all work. Quick, upload those videos!

The theory of tagwebs and the ideas that comprise it have fundamentally changed my brain. My abilities to solve problems, to make analogies, to make jokes, to explain tagwebs, to understand people, to think -- all of these things have been improved greatly. I now understand how my brain works, and I can act in ways that embraces that knowledge. I believe that we are on the verge of a major evolutionary step in the way we use and understand our brains, and that we will begin to see the effects of this change immediately.

NEW YORK- Two teenagers - one a 14-year-old girl - were charged Tuesday in the shooting death of an aspiring actress who challenged a group of muggers on a Manhattan street.
Rudy Fleming, 19, was charged with murder, robbery, attempted robbery and weapons possession, said Assistant District Attorney Robert Hettleman. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison and possibly the death penalty, Hettleman said.

Our first attempt on filming panoramic video was not really well planed. It was just a ride to the local supermarket. But what came out after editing still looks crazy for me even after watching it a dozen of times.

I was listening to NPR in the car this morning and they said that the Pope is "in hospital."

What happened to the "the?"

I'm over at Joshua's and he showed me his HD TV. The new Comcast cable box for HD does not support a serial connection to TiVo.

That stinks.

So now I'm off to bring my PowerBook to Tech Superpowers. They are going to swap out my dying hard drive for a new one. It's like heart surgery for my Mac. I hope they can transfer all my programs since I'm just half-way reloading them from when I erased my drive.

Turns out the geniuses at the Apple store aren't so smart after all since all the advice they gave me about my failing drive was wrong.

Let's review:

1. Run Diskwarrior
2. Reinstall the OS
3. Erase the drive and reinstall the OS

If they'd taken a look at the SMART drive feature in the first place they would have known at that point that the drive needed to be replaced.

Please send you good vibes in the direction of Newbury Street in Boston for a full recovery of my Mac. ;-)

Update - 2:11 PM:
I'm sitting in the Tech Superpowers Internet Cafe, typing to you from my born again Mac! It was a quick surgery and recovery.

Mike Baker - the service manager, says the first thing you should to if you are having drive problems is to look at your S.M.A.R.T. drive status.

If you are in the Boston area, I'm comfortable suggesting that you bring in your sick Mac's to Tech Superpowers.

All Things Considered, January 31, 2005 · Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ, is the star of a new broadcasting medium. His show, Daily Source Code, claims some 50,000 listeners -- but can't be heard on the traditional airwaves. Instead, it's a podcast, so-called because it's delivered via the Internet directly to iPods and other personal listening devices.

The podcast pushes the range of personal online rantings to something close to an international radio broadcast. And as NPR's Nathan Santamaria reports, the quality is low, but the hopes are high.

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About Me

Steve is a Social Media Traveler. Companies, brands, and destinations send my wife and I on trips in hopes that we will publicly share our experiences via social media. Examples include opening festivities for the Hermitage Club and traveling with GMC to the Super Bowl. (Go Pats!) We are available for more branded experience trips.